Music Discovery Workshop & Youth Collegium to perform Friday, June 19

With record enrollment at the Music Discovery/Youth Collegium program, we’re more eager than ever to invite you to attend our final camp performance this Friday night! If you want some good news about early music’s future, nothing will make you happier than seeing four dozen young people truly embrace historical performance with instruments, voices, dance, arts, and drama.

You’ll meet two new faculty members, dance teacher Jamia Hansen-Murray and voice teacher Jonathon Hampton. You’ll see the inaugural appearance of our Youth Collegium programs—a vocal ensemble singing music of Monteverdi and Vincenzo Galilei and a baroque chamber orchestra with players aged 13–17 playing Corelli. You’ll hear all the students playing and singing in early-music chamber ensembles and see our play about the life of Galileo, with children and teens in full period costume crowned by beautiful hats they’ve stitched by hand in crafts class this week. Is there anywhere else you can see young people kicking up their heels in galliards and branles?

As a teacher during the camp, one of the things that really strikes me is how fully the students embrace the material. Here are three of the moments that charmed me in the last couple of days:

I asked a group of students what their favorite moment on Tuesday had been. One twelve-year-old chose the moment when she had announced sadly in an ensemble class that a harpsichord probably wouldn’t fit in her house, only to hear the happy news that she might consider a spinet.

A thirteen-year-old eagerly raised her hand to name the four Galilean moons of Jupiter. (Can you?)

A seventeen-year-old violinist reminded me that he really wants to see the sixteenth-century ornamentation treatises I promised to bring in.

These kinds of kids give me hope for the future, and I hope they have the same effect on you!

–Shulamit Kleinerman

The Music Discovery/Youth Collegium concert takes place this Friday night at 6pm in the Parish Hall at St. Mary Magdalen Church (2005 Berryman St, Berkeley; entrance off the parking lot). Free, all ages, open to the public, potluck to follow.